Turkey’s Move to Silence Twitter

The Turkish government’s assault on free speech reached a self-defeating low this week with its order to silence Twitter — an authoritarian move that quickly backfired in the tech-savvy world of social media.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s feverish crackdown on news reports of corruption within his government and family previously led to the bullying and jailing of dozens of journalists. And now he’s aiming to “eradicate Twitter,” as he put it, for allegedly violating citizens’ privacy, a pretext for snuffing out further disclosures and criticism of his regime as national elections approach. “Everyone will see how powerful the state of the Republic of Turkey is,” he thundered on Thursday, before the government crackdown began.

Instantly, Mr. Erdogan was the target of worldwide social media protest and mockery. Even the Turkish President, Abdullah Gul, took an obvious way around the ban, using mobile text messaging to air his views. President Gul was complicit last month in approving the government’s new claims to power over web media and the court system. But once the storm over the Twitter ban arose, there was Mr. Gul saying it was not really possible to silence such a public forum.

Mr. Erdogan’s brutal move was patently directed at stopping the continuing reports of bid-rigging, money laundering and payoffs to government officials’ families. He angrily insisted in December that one leaked recording — purporting to be his warning to his son to get rid of large sums of cash in advance of a police raid — was fabricated. Even before the Twitter crackdown, the government was the global leader in pressing Google to remove thousands of items from its sites. It had blocked YouTube access and ranked with Iran and China in its abuse of journalists, a woeful turn for a once promising democracy.

Officials of the European Union and the United States separately condemned the ban as unwarranted censorship that interferes with an open society’s need for unfettered transparency and accountability.